Monday, August 17, 2015

Where Clicks Reign, Audience Is King - The New York Times

"Since the days when most major cities supported multiple newspapers, the news media has long been subject to groupthink, and prone to search for sensation. But as more readers move toward online social networks, and as publishers desperately seek scale to bring in revenue, many have deplored a race toward repetitive, trivial journalism, so noisy that it drowns out more considered work.

Reading disposable web journalism is “like eating a whole bag of Doritos,” Joshua Topolsky, a founder of the technology website The Verge, said in an interview. “You look up and think, ‘What am I doing?’ ” Mr. Topolsky recently left his job overseeing Bloomberg’s web properties, and afterward posted an essay that in part expressed frustration with what is published online."